Blue Hour, by Alonso Cueto (Peru, Global Challenge 1/21)
A successful lawyer confronts the awful legacy of his father's past, and the atrocities he committed fighting Shining Path revolutionaries. Similar territory to Santiago Roncagliolo's excellent Red April, if a little less gory. 8/10
‘The people round here aren’t like people elsewhere,’ she went on slowly. ‘Nobody here believes that life is a normal state. Here, they know that life is a shadow. A friend said that to me once. Death is a good mistress.’
Scarred, by Thomas Enger (Norway)
Burned and Pierced, the first two Henning Juul stories, were both five star reads for me but this outing was a disappointment. Juul is a strong, distinctive character, physically and psychologically deeply scarred by the fire that killed his youg son, but he is less clearly drawn here. He was also struggling to adapt to the demands of online journalism, making interesting comments on the nature of news and news gathering, but this is sacrificed for a fairly routine political scandal plotline that didn't grip me. Will definitely stay with Enger, though... 6/10
The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, by Georges Simenon (Belgium)
The third Maigret novel criss-crosses Northern Europe - looking forward to the series settling in Paris. 6/10
The Blind Man's Garden, by Nadeem Aslam (Pakistan, Global Challenge 2/21)
Set in the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months after 9/11 this is a challenging read. Life under the shadow of the Taliban is awful, made worse by the banditry of tribal warlords for whom the US invasion is a like a lottery win. Aslam shows how incomprehensible the Americans are to the devout Muslims caught up in a war from which there is no escape. 9/10
He falls asleep looking at the photograph on the far wall. The warlord is shaking hands with an American colonel. The date on the frame says it was taken soon after the Taliban regime was toppled last month. The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man must earn millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through his area, and for the militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.
Rereads towards the 2014 TBR Pile Challenge in February: Nil